logo

 

     
 
Home
Site Map
Search
 
:: Bitwise Courses ::
 
Bitwise Dusty Archives
 
 
 

rss

 
 

ruby in steel

learn aikido in north devon

Learn Aikido in North Devon

 


Section :: books

- Format For Printing...

Flex 3 In Action

Book Review
Friday 1 May 2009.
 

Flex 3 In Action $49.99
Tariq Ahmed with Jon Hirschi and Faisal Abid
Manning: http://www.manning.com/ahmed/
ISBN: 1933988746
576 Pages

There is a boom in Flex 3 books at the moment. Flex is Adobe’s framework for developing rich internet applications, typically using Flash graphics for creating the user interface elements. Tariq Ahmed’s book is (according to the publisher) “an easy-to-follow, hands-on Flex tutorial. Chock-full of examples, this book goes beyond feature coverage and helps you put Flex to work in real day-to-day tasks.”

In twenty-four chapters the book quickly goes through the basics of Flex and its programming language, ActionScript. By chapter 4 it gets onto some of the specifics of application development such as creating user interfaces using Flex layouts and containers. Other topics relating to the design and programming of Flex using components, validators and formatters take us up to chapter ten. Then we enter into more specialist areas such as event-handling, data services and XML.

In my opinion, this is one of the better Flex books available. Assuming that the reader already has programming experience in some other language and framework, it gets down to the interesting stuff pretty quickly. Moreover, its topic-based approach makes it easy to dip into chapters in order to locate explanations and code samples that let you learn how Flex works and how to make use of specific features of Flex and ActionScript in your own projects.

So, if you already know a bit of ActionScript but can’t figure out how to create custom components, you can go straight to chapter 17 to find all the information you need to get started. If you want to know about styles, fonts, effects or drag and drop, there are sections on these too.

The thing I like about this book is that it is comprehensive without being verbose. Far too many programming books say far too little in far too many words. Even though it contains well over 500 pages of text (not counting the introduction and index) this is not a book of waffle and padding. It is clear, concise and to-the-point. This is a book for programmers who don’t have the time to read programming books!

AddThis Social Bookmark Button


Home